Fifty Galleons
by obfuscate
Summary: A series of vignettes focusing on Slytherins in a very slightly AU HBP Hogwarts.
1. Fifty Galleons

**Fifty Galleons**

He never told her. He never told anyone, but he never told her especially.

It would have been cruel to tell her, he reasoned. They had had enough pathos and conflict and epic battles to last a lifetime. Dank dungeons that reeked of overbrewed potions and the particular scent that followed the nasty end of a nasty journal, maleficent ink and malevolently crackling pages. When things like that were written across your childhood memories, you didn't need a marital spat to top it all off. 

Besides, he didn't understand it himself. How could he explain it to her?

She was too practical to ferret (what a cringingly apt word!) out the meaning between the clumsy phrases he tried to work out in his head, those moments he thought of telling her. Someone else might have been able to understand the things he was too cowardly to say out loud—someone like Hermione, maybe, who seemed to have an intrinsic and entirely unsettling affinity for fishing the truth out of people. It was because she wasn't afraid to dive in, he thought. She rolled up her sleeve and plunged her fingers into the clam's mouth with barely a grimace and extracted, wriggling, the naked truth.

But when he thought of telling her, he began to shrivel in anticipation of the face she would make. She'd look just like her mother (and it was happening every day, more and more. He felt guilty for noticing the way her hips had thickened and her face gone ruddier and fleshier, but he couldn't help it. She was no longer the willowy young woman he had married, eyes starry with admiration for The Hero Who Saved Them All, never mind it had mostly been by playing dead. She was—he swallowed—motherly. It made sense, she was a mother. But still--). Her hair would verily light on fire and she would turn on him, perhaps brandishing a spoon, and unleash a flurry of questions upon his bowed head, and he couldn't handle that, he couldn't. He could handle utter evil and devastating choices, but Ginny Potter, nee Weasely, was quite simply beyond him at the best of times.

The memory was not in his Pensieve, as a result of this. Not that he thought she would snoop. She wouldn't, it would be beneath her. But he didn't take the chance. Not to mention that his was already nearly to the brim with gruesome visions of the violence that had permeated the world for those unbearable months. A mottled ear, lying separated from its owner. The look on his sister-in-law's face when she realized that her husband was to be scarred for life. The day they explained to Teddy Lupin that his parents were not simply on an extended vacation.

No. All of that was horrific, but she knew of it. This was, this was private. 

It was so long ago, anyway. Sixth year, in the months before he was dating Ginny. He was sixteen, for God's sake, and had only a few sloppy kisses to his name. His days were shot through with sexual frustration. It was only to be expected that it would escape somehow, the way electricity escapes through your fingertips and takes you by surprise, and the one on the receiving end as well.

Only…only the identity of the recipient surprised him almost as much as the friction shock.

He'd been obsessed with him that year, more so than the preceding years. He followed him, learnt his schedule off by heart, and generally stalked him more thoroughly than he ever had Ginny.

And that night had been a bad night. He'd talked to Ron and Hermione in the common room, flicking his wand absently to see the fireflies zoom in from the open window and immolate themselves in the larger, brighter flame of the open blaze in the hearth. It was the little cruelties that you stopped noticing, after a while, he thought as he did so.

"Harry, will you stop," Hermione had hissed, exasperated.

"Why, going to set up a society for fireflies?" Ron had shot back. "What disgusting bodily function are you going to name this one after?"

"I thought maybe you'd give me some ideas, seeing as you're mature enough to make about sixty jokes a day with one of them as the punchline," Hermione snipped.

Harry wasn't really listening; he'd spotted Ginny across the room with Dean. Dean said something with a tender (Harry substituted "sappy") look on his face, and tipped Ginny's chin up to kiss her softly.

He looked quickly back down at the map in his lap. It was completely and utterly devoid of Malfoy, as per usual. Pity. It would have been nice to punch something, right now. He had a distinct compulsion to toss the map into the flames along with all the firefly ashes, but he knew he'd regret it later, if not for the loss then for the fact that Hermione would be certain never to shut up again.

"—I—but—is that even possible--?" Hermione squeaked, her face rather pink. 

Ron snorted.

She made a rude gesture at him that took Harry by surprise; she wasn't usually one for things like that. "You imbecile!" she flung at him.

Ron opened his mouth, but Harry stood before he could speak and put the map in his robes along with his wand. "I can't handle the bickering, be back in a while," he said dully, and swept from the room. They watched him go with open mouths and ashen faces.

He didn't care. Ginny and Dean were inching ever closer to the boy's dormitory stairs.

In the hallway it was far from peaceful; two second-year girls rushed giggling toward the Fat Lady, pursued by a lanky, good-looking third-year boy who was rumored to be the most likely candidate for Seeker when Harry left the school, and his pudgy sidekick, who was huffing and puffing along next to him. Sweeney—was that the Quidditch player's name?—yes, it must be, it was—was amusing himself by enchanting the girls' hair to curl of its own accord and sing loudly:

Susannah and Trudy  
You play games with my soul!  
So heartlessly, cruelly  
Oh, do it some more!

Cheesy little bugger. Harry scowled.

The map was still Malfoyless the second try. Harry was about to put it away in despair when, to his astonishment, a small dot labeled Draco Malfoy appeared out of thin air on the seventh-floor corridor and began to make its strident way towards the stairs.

Harry broke out into a run.

The portraits scowled at him on the way, but he didn't care, he almost had him, he could feel it in his bones. He would prove him to be—something solid he could fight against. Not this vague creeping sense of dread that had infiltrated the school. He couldn't stand that, it was like having his hair plucked out a single strand at a time. It made him ache to hurt something.

He bribed a stairway into turning the right way and pelted up its obliging length, pausing only to snap, "Mind your own damn business," to the inquisitive knight who wished to know if he had a young lady he was intent upon wooing. The knight drew back, offended in an aloof sort of way. Knights were like that. They got annoyed if you made fun of their helmet plumes, too. Ron had made a peacock joke in fourth year and had been forced to avoid the knights' portraits all year, as they shouted fourteenth-century obscenities at him whenever he came near.

Harry swung around into the stairwell and nearly ran over Draco Malfoy, who sat hunched at its foot.

They both sprang back, drawing wands, breathing hard. Harry was pleased; it seemed Malfoy was as ready to fight as he was.

"What are you doing here, Potter?" Malfoy snarled, but Harry couldn't help noticing it was not up to its usual standard of drawl and his robes were crooked and—was he wearing spectacles?

"Went for a walk—are those glasses, Malfoy?"

Malfoy colored and his hand went to his face, snatching the frames from his nose. "I need them for reading. Not that you'd know anything about that. What was it you got in History of Magic again, a D?"

"I had a reason—"

"Sure, your little disfigurement. I suppose we can't let exams get in the way of vanity."

"I—that's—not the point!" He huffed out a breath through his nose, thriving strangely on the familiar combat. "Why are you here?"

"Project for class, none of your business," Malfoy said smoothly. "Why, afraid I'll pass you up? It's a bit late for that."

"I know you're doing something up there. I want to know what."

"I'm running a brothel," Malfoy said without a glimmer of expression. "It's twenty-five Galleons a girl, fifty a boy if you swing both ways…"

"I—what? A broth—"

"Oh, no, you can't have taken me seriously," Malfoy drawled. "It's too good, my sides are splitting."

Harry glared at him. 

"Well, Potter?"

"Well, what?"

"Will that be twenty-five or fifty?" Malfoy asked patiently.

Harry blinked. He knew what the real question was, and he shouldn't have had a doubt. Except that sometimes it wasn't always Ginny he thought about. The other person always, sometimes even more, on his mind, was in front of him, with that infernal curl to his too-red lips and the light from the skylight somewhere in the ceiling giving his hair a satin-white sheen.

So Harry didn't answer, he did what he knew how to do, which was hit at solid things and hope they went away. He was the epitome of a hero, and that was his one failing—he was far too simply constructed, left helpless in the wake of tangled feelings. He solved them physically, or not at all.

His first punch left a strawberry mark on Malfoy's cheekbone. His second simply resulted in the crack of a skull against concrete. And only when he was sitting on his stomach, beating the shit out of Draco Malfoy, did he realize that Malfoy wasn't even fighting back. He just lay there and let Harry hurt him.

That wasn't how it was supposed to be.

He was too thin, with bruised skin where his eyes met his nose, in that thin skin that was too dark and made him look pinched and worried. His mouth looked abnormally red on the inside, like a cut in his face, but maybe that was just because he was so pale. His ribs pressed like skeletal fingers into Harry's thighs.

Harry stopped, and really looked at him.

There must have been something like pity, or revulsion, in his eyes. Something to that effect, something that betrayed the fact that he thought under his bedclothes that Malfoy's lips curled like cupid's bows at the corners and detracted from his Slytherin swagger. A truly nasty person didn't have a mouth like that, no matter how he tried to hide it by twisting it into sneers and malicious grins.

Harry leaned closer and Malfoy's eyes widened and this was more frightening to him than being hit by Harry could have been, and that was satisfying, it was this that made him press his mouth to Malfoy's for a butterfly instant. 

There was a breathing, terrified instant and then Harry leapt to his feet and dashed out of the stairwell, shoes echoing against the stone walls.

Malfoy's face was pale and shocked against the darkness as he stood, and Harry heard him call, "So that'll be fifty Galleons, then?" because he was a bastard who was never at a loss for how to say something.

Not like Harry.

Harry, who had found and married Ginny. Harry, who watched her bustle around their children like a great motherly hen and wondered, sometimes, when he hadn't had his coffee, what he'd gotten himself into. Harry, who had no idea how to tell her something that seemed important, even though it wasn't, hadn't been for over nineteen years, since the war.

He saw him at the station and felt his chest contract when he saw him with his family. Their eyes connected briefly over the heads of their offspring, and then Harry looked away, and turned back to Ginny, dutifully. She opened her eyes wide at him and still he never told her.

He never told anyone, but he never told her especially.


	2. Easy

She didn't like the word "easy." She didn't think that was how she came off, though she supposed she might have looked a little too sophisticated for the mundane halls of Hogwarts.

It wasn't her fault that she had been twelve when breasts began to blossom. At first she'd walked hunched over, protecting herself from the incredulous stares of insolent boys whose voices had only just begun to break into pieces, crossing her arms tightly over her despised chest. Now, however, she used the advantage. She wasn't pretty; she knew she wasn't pretty. But with the combined assault of knowing smile and hips thrust out and chin held high, she had the ability to take by force the things she wanted.

She couldn't get what she really wanted. He didn't…feel the same way. She put the ellipsis into her thoughts because sometimes, she felt the brush of his hands around her waist, the way he closed his eyes lazily like a cat and lay down in her lap as she stroked his white-blond hair, and she thought: He does like me. She untangled her thoughts in his hair, liking the contrast of her red nails, listening to his long diatribes and nodding sympathetically, tossing out a malicious gibe now and then, when it was needed. He's confiding in me. He needs me.

Her skirts grew shorter; even Snape raised an eyebrow at her one memorable day when her robes fluttered open to reveal a long expanse of leg dangerously close to indecent exposure. Her necklines took a dive for her knees after she'd noticed Draco casting a slim look down her bra in Charms. She grew more brazen; the day in Charms, she'd let the quill writing her name in the air flutter down, with a quick flick of her wrist to send it neatly into the V of her cleavage, and made a show of retrieving it until she was certain Draco had seen it. 

She wished she were prettier. What was it her mother had called her? Striking. She knew it wasn't the same thing. She had a pug nose and a square jaw and her eyes were too close together for real beauty. The night of the Yule Ball she choked half of her punch out of her nose when she saw Granger, magically transformed into someone new and desirable and with much better teeth, seething with jealousy. The punch bowl next to her had started to bubble; she hadn't done anything like that, uncontrolled magic, since she was nine and she'd made her older sister's face erupt in spots.

She watched him, oh, all the time. She saw what other people didn't: how he took the threads of conversation into his hands and wove them all together, wove them around him, until things were around him, about him, starring Draco Malfoy. He protected Crabbe and Goyle. No one saw how that was true. He was more of a bodyguard than either of them were; he made sure they were included in conversations doubtless above their heads and gave hell to anyone other than himself who took the liberty of teasing them. She saw how his face was growing thinner and paler and more desperate, and the night he stumbled into the common room with bruised arms and knuckles and lips, she knew what had happened, because she was the only one who'd seen it happening. 

After all, one watcher knows another. Harry was rather obvious about watching Malfoy. He hadn't had her practice. They wanted the same thing, though he didn't know it, not exactly.

She felt her heart clench in fear; was it what Draco wanted too? That marred and martyred boy, with the air of heroism practically leaving a slime of righteousness behind him? Surely not. Harry's knees knocked together and his head was just a bit too big for his body yet and his eyes were far too green; they gave her the creeps. He couldn't want that, not when he had her.

Draco sank into a chair and put an arm over his face. She sat on the arm, stroking his neck softly, and he groaned and pulled her down into the chair with him.

"Are you all right?" she asked him, and he took his arm from his face and fixed her with the Malfoy Look. 

"Peachy. Be a dear and stop pretending you care."

She tossed her hair. "Haven't you learned by now it's not in my nature to be a dear?"

He smirked. "Be a dear and come a little closer."

She smiled in satisfaction and let him take what he wanted, even in the common room. It was deserted anyway, this late at night. He had his hand up her skirt and his robes sliding from his knobby shoulders and she was watching his mouth shape her name when she stopped moving suddenly and realized that it wasn't her name.

She pulled away and stood quickly, adjusting her skirt. Draco sat up, looking surprised. "Previous engagement?" he asked skeptically.

She bit her lip and didn't answer. Draco sighed.

"Look, what do you want?"

That was him all over, that query, knowing he could pay for whatever he wanted and not feel the brunt of it. She couldn't say what she thought: I want you, you prat, you lovely oblivious creature. She didn't have the words to tell him what it did to her when he looked like he did now, like a child let down, breakable, already damaged goods.

"My birthday's in a month," she said archly, instead, to cover her pause.

"The bracelet's already in my room," he yawned. "As many carats as you could possibly desire. Now will you come back?"

I'll come back because I want to fix you, she thought, and I don't know how to do it except to cover you with kisses and give you everything you want from me. She kissed every bruise Potter had given him and put the misplaced name behind her so she could shudder when he kissed his way down her neck.

She thought that was what she wanted, but the next day in the Great Hall she saw the look that passed between them, across their two tables, and she knew she wanted more than she could have. She caught the same hungry look in Potter's eyes that she'd seen in her mirror.

Draco's mouth was bruised and her neck had a purple mark proudly on display and everyone put two and two together and rolled their eyes knowingly, and the end of the story, for them, was that Draco had everything he wanted and she was easy.

On her birthday she thought about telling him she didn't want the bracelet, but that would have been a waste, so she slipped it on and wore it always and tried not to look at it too often. Her skirts grew longer, her necklines rose. She caught the looks between the two boys and wished that she hadn't become so adept at watching.

There were other boys, of course, always. Zabini and Nott and McLaggen. And more, always more. She kept them coming, trying to ward off those looks. She saw everything, but she wouldn't listen to the rumors about her. Pansy wasn't easy, no matter what they said.


	3. The Exception

He was not the sort of person who got unduly upset over things. At the age of seven, he had perfected the bored, arched eyebrow, the knowing smile. "Yes," he drawled to his reflection. "I'm sure that's exactly how it is." It was practice for later.

He needed it, later. It didn't do to show too much of what you felt.

His mother had taught him that. She was Spanish (the surname was his father's) and tall and porcelain smooth, unruffled, self-assured. Everyone's idea of what a film star should be. Flawless features, unshakeable smile. He only knew her by the way she allowed herself to thaw slightly in his presence. Never entirely—it was her persona, she could not let it go—but enough to let him know that she loved him. Since he was five and his father had had a mysterious accident with an enchanted well (rather dramatic, he thought, but then, his mother had always had a well-developed sense of pathos and climax), he had watched with his inherited impassivity the procession of lovers slip past him uninterestedly and rush into his mother's famed embrace. They showered her with praise, with gifts, sometimes with abuse. They longed to touch her curling lips and marble skin, make her theirs, only theirs. But she never belonged to them. They belonged to her, she set them down in her neat, careful Spanish in her book, the one his father had given her as an anniversary gift the year he was born, and consequently forgot about them. There were entries in there from before his father's death. He knew; he'd stolen the book periodically to see how many more had been added to the list.

It was important not to care, he understood. If you cared, they held power over you. He detested that idea.

There had been one man, by the name of Jeremiah Bones. His mother had forgotten not to care about him. She had thrown herself after the man, renounced all sense of propriety and screamed herself hoarse outside his flat, on his answering machine, in Howlers, after he had ended things with her.

He had been seven then, and watched the way her face slowly recovered from its twisted, ugly snarl and her voice lost the throaty abundance of Rs that meant that she was too angry to apply her carefully enunciated English. Her eyes lost their tender puffiness, but they never returned to quite their normal state afterwards. They were a bit cooler, a bit more gray, a bit more lost. He knew that being in so many bits could not be good for his mother, but she never said anything to give him the idea that she was not in complete control, and so he did not say anything.

From his mother, he knew there were two extremes to which he and his name could slide: blaze and blasé, pain and protection against ever being hurt.

He was extraordinarily disappointed in himself when he stumbled into the former.

His trysts at school generally tended to be brief and passionate, a quick hot culmination of an acknowledged attraction before his end faded into embers and he kissed his flavor of the week goodbye. Female or male, it didn't particularly matter. He had known from an early age that he had no real preference either way. There was nothing about the pleasant curves and soft edges of girls that precluded his equal appreciation of the abrupt corners and hard lines of boys. Either sex was more than willing to let him know his attentions were appreciated. He'd inherited more than impassivity from his mother; neither had his father been ugly. He carried what he had with the kind of bravado that made people's heads turn, played up his straight nose and dark brows and brooding allure that he worked daily to improve, and hid his slightly knobby elbows and too-feminine hands. He could have his way with half of Hogwarts; in fact, he nearly might have had it not been for her.

It was maddening, that was the word. She was not at all his type. He preferred adult composure, a mutual agreement not to make a big deal out of whatever the deal of the moment was. Sex was sex, a necessity, like breathing or barbed comments in the common room. He generally preferred Ravenclaws because of this; to be sure, he didn't dally in his own house more than he could help it.

She was immature, vindictive, spiteful. She was too forward, too brazen, unladylike. She wore her skirts too short.

He'd known her all his life, it wasn't like she was something new and entrancing. On the first day of school they'd sat in the same compartment on the Hogwarts express, and she'd scooped up a wayward toad they'd later discovered belonged to a bumbling, freckle-faced boy inexplicably Sorted into Gryffindor rather than Hufflepuff, and pointed her new wand at it, saying, "Aquarius." The toad had given an audible gulp and transformed for a moment into a wriggling, gasping goldfish. Back in toad form, it hopped away with all of its small leathery might, having disliked life as a goldfish with such a horrid girl.

He had laughed and asked her where she'd learned it, and she'd gone a bit pink and said, "My sister did it to…someone I knew once."

"Useful trick. Teach me. I'll practice on Longbuggery."

This elicited a wicked smile that he quite liked, and she'd put her Chocolate Frog cards in her pocket and stuck out her hand, sticky with chocolate. "I'm Pansy Parkinson, who're you?" she asked candidly.

"Blaise Zabini," he answered coolly, raising his overworked right eyebrow at her chocolate-smeared hand and declining to take it.

She wiped her hand on her robes, which were embarrassingly frilly and pink. They reeked of a mother's bad influence. "I like you," she told him, and at that his eleven-year-old composure slipped just a whit and he smiled.

Pansy had no shame, that was what was the matter with her. She was patently in love with Draco Malfoy, whom everyone knew was being eyed up by the Boy Who Lived. Zabini wouldn't have given a damn who Malfoy fucked except that it was tearing Pansy up. He watched as she hurled herself at Draco, just as his mother had hurled herself at Bones, with what some might consider success—but Zabini was smarter than that. He had a thing for Potter, and no matter how high up her thighs her skirts inched, he was never going to notice her.

Truth be told, he didn't understand the attraction. He and Draco had fooled around a few times in fifth year and it was nothing special; the kid had a Napoleon complex and absolutely no idea what to do with his tongue.

There was one perfect night when he thought he'd gotten it right. He'd spotted her alone in the common room, absently touching the world-class love bite on her neck and watching the firelight glint off an equally exquisite bracelet. He'd sat down next to her and said, "So who'd you suck off to earn that one, Pans?"

She'd started and given him a dirty look. In the light from the green flames her face was almost pretty—or—he revised—not pretty, as such, but put together well, the purebred lines of her face combining to make a countenance difficult to ignore. He liked the fact that she wasn't really pretty; it made him certain that there must be something more interesting about her than her bone structure, something his mother didn't have, when she had everything else.

"Your mother, that's who," she'd returned, oblivious to the direction of his thoughts. She had turned the bracelet around on her wrist and said thoughtfully, "It was a gift, Zabini, ever heard of those?"

"Oh yeah? From whom?" But he already knew the answer.

She knew he knew, and gave him a rueful smile.

"What's in it for me if I give you earrings to match, hm?" he asked, pressing his thigh to hers, watching her eyes glitter like the bracelet. They always hit on each other without really thinking about it; it was comforting to know somebody wanted you, even if they weren't ever going to have you. It wasn't joking on Zabini's side, at least.

"I thought I wasn't your type," she purred, shifting in the chair so he could see down her blouse.

"Everybody's my type," he told her. "Well—everyone who happens to be worthy of my golden loins, that is."

"Am I worthy?"

He caught his breath. "Not in the least. But I'll be willing to make an exception."

She gave him a predatory smile then, and closed her eyes, an invitation. In an moment he was draped across her, lost in the way she felt beneath him, kissing him. She slipped her hands into his robes and his mouth dislodged from hers from an instant and he gasped without meaning to.

"Pansy," he said, and thought she understood.

But the next day it was like nothing had ever happened, and the bracelet was back on her wrist, retrieved from where he'd stuffed it into the armchair's cushions, and Pansy was sitting on Draco's lap in the morning, laughingly feeding him toast and letting him lick the jam from her fingertips, eyes half-closed obscenely. He stalked from the Great Hall and when she asked him later what he was so pissed about he just shrugged and watched her walk back to Malfoy.

He didn't like the feeling of having been a fling. Not even a fling, anymore. A flung.

Blaise told his mother about it when he went home at Christmastime two weeks later, and she raised an eyebrow and said, "You got involved," a statement, not a question, an accusation, not an exoneration.

She was right. Blaise kept his feelings to himself and when Harry Potter came racing past him in the Slytherin side of the dungeons he pointed the way to Malfoy's rooms and took some unwarranted pleasure in the way Pansy didn't eat dinner that night.

He moved on to Nott, and made sure he was only a fling.


	4. Act Two

She doesn't like anybody.

Or that is what she tells herself, when she thinks of it at all. It's easier this way, to ensure that her grimace remains satisfactorily intact. That it does is necessary for her continued existence as Slytherin, menacing, untouchable.

Imagine what they would say if she let a wayward smile break forth. "Ye Gods!" they would cry. (She doesn't think they would really say such a thing, but in her mind, that is what they exclaim, with dramatic, silent-movie sighs and hands pressed to their chests.) "Be that Bulstrode who giggled so girlishly? Forsooth and begone with you! It cannot be!"

Or something to that effect.

Her thoughts are littered with exclamation points and stage directions, perhaps because such things are missing from her life. There are no dramatic entrances and exits, aside from the flouncy, door-slamming fits Pansy gets into when she's in a mood. There are no romantic soliloquies, no graceful swoons. She sits too much, she thinks. Sits in classes and in common rooms and even her thoughts are taken at a leisurely pace, nothing urgent enough to require any mental calisthenics.

This is why she is friends with Pansy.

Pansy's entire life is taken at breakneck speed. She hurls herself at it like she hurls herself at everything else, with no thought for consequences or common sense. She is very like a character in a play, Millicent thinks rather wistfully. The way she tries and somewhat fails to move her shoulders like a cat when she walks, in weak imitation of the born-to-it aristocracy in Slytherin; the way she talks a bit too fast, sometimes tripping over her tongue in her haste to get the words out; her absolute lack of self-consciousness.

Millicent is the bulwark against which Pansy crashes, something solid to nod and not take her too seriously. Some people think Millicent is Pansy's, but in fact it is, if anything, the other way around. Millicent looks upon Pansy with a kind of motherly affection, stolid toleration of her fluctuating presence. And admiration, somewhere in the confines of her immutable existence. She was stagnate; Pansy was anything but.

Pansy knows how to make people like her, too, the kind of charisma that is a necessary possession for leading ladies. Millicent does not have the knack of charming manipulation, Slytherin though she is. Even she can see that Pansy is not pretty, but she assaults you with bare skin and red lips and biting comments until you are cornered into believing that she is. Millicent is taller than a good portion of the boys in sixth year and built to scale, an Amazon of a witch. Her feet hung over the end of her bed for a year in fourth before they learned the proper spells to enable her to enlarge it. Female Slytherins were constructed gracefully, born of proper breeding and therefore adhering to the acceptable measurements of their sex. Small and fine-boned, made to wield knives meant to stab in the back, not great hulking swords.

Millicent is excellent at fencing.

She thinks sometimes of this, of how she would love to engage in a duel, no wands, just swords, real swords, with swashbuckling steps and bantering capers that continue even as the combatants parry and thrust across the stage. She wants to force a fight of this sort upon one of the whinging midgets in Gryffindor or Ravenclaw. (Nobody fights a Hufflepuff; it isn't dignified. They simply aren't worth the trouble it takes to squelch them. Thus does Millicent live up to her ancestry in her secret thoughts.) The kinds of girls that populate Gryffindor and Ravenclaw, the ones who have everything. Looks and brains and boys in every flavor licking their boots. The kinds of girls every boy goes for. Ginny Weasely, with her shockingly red hair and ever-present effervescence, who never worked for anything and treated boys like dirt and then got angry when someone expressed a negative opinion about her family's integrity. Cho Chang, who struck the poses of the damsel in distress for so long Millicent thought eventually someone would have to realize that if she kept going at this rate, she would just begin to leak mucus and saltwater whenever spoken to, out of habit, like a Pavlov experiment. Even Hermione Granger, who was an insufferable know-it-all and had a face like a rabbit to boot, even she belongs to their ranks, having finally attained everything she could desire—top marks, a (professionally awkward) boyfriend, and the friendship of the Boy Who Suffered Loudly Whenever Convenient. Millicent would love to back these girls up against a wall and hold a blade to their throats. They don't possess every kind of power there is.

But only she knows that, and therefore the point is rather moot.

Still, the thought steals into her mind when she spots Ginny pressed up against a wall, enthusiastically trading her own saliva for Hero Spit. (Harry comes in capital letters in the Wizarding world. By now, it's a habit for Millicent to think of him in such terms. It's born from years of hearing whispers of the Chosen One, and the Dark Lord. It's born from years of trying to make those capitals a stigma, rather than a commendation, along with all the others in her house.)

Millicent's own experience with other people's saliva is fairly narrow. She is sixteen, and has been kissed once in her life, by a shrimpy second cousin who had wiped his mouth afterward and told her he was breaking up with her because he thought his heirs might turn out a bit funny with the family connections between them. She didn't particularly care about him, nor did she want any more kisses from his wet and girlishly plush lips. Kisses were damp, fumbling, uncomfortable affairs. She didn't understand the Weasely girl.

She presses it out of her mind and walks to Charms.

Day follows day. Millicent feels that she must drag her ankles thickly through time. Is there never to be a second act?

She almost doesn't recognize change when it arrives.

It arrives slowly, unfolding in the corners of her eyes at the margins of lessons. A glimmer of awareness. The awareness is Hufflepuff shaped, but not really, not really. He is not a Hufflepuff at heart, no more than she is a Slytherin at heart. They are burdened by their families. She doesn't know how she knows this about him. Perhaps she doesn't and she is merely projecting.

On Tuesday he smiles at her in Double History of Magic and she is so startled she forgets to smile back. He is confronted with the sneer that is comfortable habit to her features now, and looks away before she can rectify her mistake.

Zacharius Smith, she writes at the bottom of her essay for Snape one night, and then is horrified at this new transgression of her quill and cuts the end off the parchment with too much force, so that the edges are singed and the tip of her wand wheezes feebly.

She goes to Slughorn's Christmas party wearing the only set of dress robes she owns. They are green velvet and make her look like a Christmas tree, especially if she wears earrings.

She doesn't wear earrings, but she goes anyway and stands in the corner alone while Pansy chats up the visiting vampire, who eyes the cleavage on display and swallows visibly, Adam's apple bobbing. She feels like a fool.

Around one in the morning, when she has had time to get well acquainted with the house-elf hawking free drinks, Slughorn suggests that they all wear masks and then unmask in an hour, regardless of the fact that it's not midnight. Millicent doesn't wear a mask. She finds the whole affair boring and wishes she could leave, but Pansy will likely find herself rather dehydrated should she continue to press like that against Sanguini.

Millicent presses herself further into the wall, wishing she could sink into the stones.

A boy wearing a Tragedy mask is suddenly in front of her with a mighty hiccup. She hates the drunk. All drunks, all temperaments. She wishes he would stop breathing liquor on her and leave before she vomits.

"Not one for masks, eh?" he says, jolly and unaware that she is aching to rip the false frown from his face.

She doesn't answer him, just looks gruffly at the floor.

"Dance with me?" he tries, despite the fact that no one else is dancing.

Her head jerks up and she looks at him in disbelief. He does not seem to be joking.

"Well?" he prods. "Can you speak?"

"Yes, and without slurring my consonants, astoundingly," she tells him. "You need to learn to hold your drink. I could probably drink you under the table."

He sweeps the mask from his face and bows deeply. "Touche!" he says merrily, and when he straightens she sees that it is Zacharius Smith behind the mask of Tragedy. He takes her hand. She makes a noise.

She doesn't like anybody, she thinks to herself, but it is a thought that doesn't belong in the new kind of play she has suddenly been flung into. The new one might even possess something of a happy ending.

Millicent takes his hand and still does not smile. Some things take working up to.

She is closer than she has been in years, though. Somehow she thinks he might know that. He returns the smile she never gave him, and for a moment there is nobody Millicent doesn't like.


	5. Denouement

He stands in the back of the room, half-hidden behind a Gryffindor banner charmed to growl at passers-by and watches as Potter and Malfoy cast sneering looks at each other over their shoulders, feeling dispirited. He has not had enough mead to get into the spirit of the evening.

Where is Zach? _He _has had quite enough to drink. In fact, if it weren't for the fact that he is loath to move from behind his cunning hiding space, he would consider bribing a house elf to start replacing his glasses with flavored water. He's too smashed by now to know the difference, anyway.

He's not going to move, though. It's too good a spot to pass up. He can see everything from here. Pansy and her rather peckish date stagger past the banner and it mewls pitifully at them. The charm has started to wear off, apparently: that gives the party approximately another hour before things go entirely to pot and everyone leaves for everyone else's bedrooms. It's like watching a play, he thinks. They are somewhere in the third act, nearly to the climax, unable to see the denouement. These thoughts are Millicent's bad influence; she thinks like a thespian, but doesn't act the part.

Sometimes he feels as if he has spent his life watching people. He watched his father turn from a hollowed-out widower into a person filled with something too big to contain; it heated his cheeks and turned his eyes cruel. (That was unfair, he checks himself. It wasn't as if he didn't agree with his father's ideas—on principle. The fact was that Muggles made him itchy and uncomfortable. There were so many of them. They bred like cockroaches. And they were missing something, that indefinable air of mystique that graced the world he had grown up in. He did not put it so in his own mind; he only knew that they didn't look right, and flinched when he passed one in King's Cross. So it was not the ideas he objected to, it was the reality of them. The killings at the World Cup—distasteful and not to the elegant standards of his social rank. The woman who stayed over at his house nights, and spent the time when she was forced to socialize with him helping him practice Unforgivables on dormice—unstable and a little frightening. He thought her eyes were creepy, and that his mother would never have had her son perform an outlawed spell.)

He watched his friends turn teapots into tortoises and meanwhile thread their plotlines through their gazes, as Pansy became too painful to observe and Draco carried on being falsely oblivious. He watched Zabini, when everyone else had stopped bothering, and saw the way his eyes slid down the table to settle in Pansy's cleavage. It wasn't the ordinary homage everyone paid to her chest. He saw Blaise's uncalculating, dangerously open expression and tried not to see. He watched as Harry Potter began to follow Draco with his eyes, and saw the way that Draco didn't stop him, even unconsciously exaggerated his own natural grace to make Potter's eyes linger longer.

And he watched Zach. It was easy in the beginning. When they were fifteen and bumbling and yanking up their caustic facades to ensure that no one saw the children beneath them. Fifteen was not too young to fall in love. And he did, unequivocally. He went absolutely batshit crazy about the boy, and if he'd had any poetry skills whatsoever he would have spent all his time composing sonnets to his hazel eyes. It was exactly the kind of love that Millicent used to fantasize over, when they were seven and sprawled out whispering in the attic. Talk of clasped hands and heaving bosoms that she'd cribbed from the Romantic era of portrait painting, the subjects of which were often severely lacking in propriety, inhibitions, and clothing.

(She'd kissed him once, Millicent. Pressed her slightly sticky lips to his without warning and then promptly blushed and made a face. He hadn't enjoyed it either, but she should have, and in his humiliation—was he any good at kissing? Shouldn't it have been better than that?—he told her that he was worried about the safety of his heirs and left it at that. It was his first brush with failed romance.)

This was the type of epic love with which his heart had thumped for Zacharius Smith. He wrote _Theo and Zach_ in the margins of his History of Magic notes and marveled at the mystic sign that was the matching four letters in their nicknames.

And when Zach had kissed him that time in the dorm—well, there was nothing Theo wouldn't have done to halt the world's inexorable progress and stay right there, lips pressed firmly to Zacharius Smith's.

He tried valiantly to record every moment of it. How one day after Charms they'd skived off Potions and gone down to the lake, and ensconced under a tree, Zach's head resting on his shoulder, he'd moved his head the necessary fraction and captured his mouth, an action that held as much triumph as Waterloo must have. And in sweet capitulation, Zach had kissed him back, threading his fingers through the dark curls at the base of Theo's neck, and they had found sitting far too much to ask of their melting bones and sank down into the long grass together, where they'd stayed almost an hour.

Zach's eyes had opened at the sound of laughter, far away. Theo told him, "We're in plain view here, you know," a hint of a smile tugging at his lips. At the look on Zach's face, he laughed outright and then bit Zach's lip for him. "Does that bother you?" he murmured into his mouth, and Zach relaxed and kissed him back again. They sat up dizzily sometime in the mid-afternoon.

Zach's blond hair was mussed to the point that it was useless to try to fix it. "We have a test today…" he murmured, still unfocused.

"I'll probably fail," Theo told him, "but goddammit, it was worth it."

And Zach had laughed that open, unfettered laugh, brow smooth, and Theo watched him and wondered if he were real.

He was of the opinion, now, that it had all been real, but simply unfeasible. Happiness like that was not meant to go on forever amongst fifteen-year-olds. Zach was just unwilling to accept this fact. Theo had known it since he started choosing his journals over Zach, trying to escape him in between classes, find an empty corner in which he could pour out his thoughts on the pages. Things slid away from him, and he couldn't reclaim that same feeling.

He wasn't in love with Zach anymore. Only with bits of him: his girlishly tapered fingers, the light on his hair—the laugh. But the whole of Zach escaped him, now. He couldn't force himself back into the role of lover, and stood off to the side as friend, protector, watcher.

Zach is unaware. He's too vulnerable, missing something hard that was essentially Slytherin, something that keeps you from inconvenient things like broken hearts. Zach follows him around like a puppy, trying too hard to recapture that intangible dynamic of lovers. Theo cant bring himself to tell him to go away, and so he keeps up his end of the charade for Zach, because he loves him still, if he isn't in love with him anymore. He wishes he could just erase himself entirely from Zach's life, or at least his immediate presence—become more of a background observer rather than the love interest. Take back all his margin doodles and sly little smiles and the way his shoes met Zach's underneath the Charms table.

He tries to tell Zach this, sometimes, without speaking. _I'm afraid of breaking you_, his fingers whisper as they trace a gentle line on Zach's palm. He watches Zach close his eyes and knows he is thinking that it is their lives together he traces—the beginning, not the end. _You're too fragile_, speak his eyes when he pushes Zach's fair hair back from his forehead after an unfortunate accident in Quidditch involving several untoward remarks and one of the smaller Weasleys' collision with the commentary box. Zach smiles in his sleep and Theo knows he does not understand what kind of healing he wishes to communicate. _I won't leave you_, he thinks hard now, _because I'm afraid if I do you will simply snap, and I won't be the one to do that to you._

Theo is faintly jealous as he sees Draco's hand skim over Potter's, and stuff itself quickly in his robes pocket as if ashamed at having gotten away with it. Theo knows that feeling, and wishes devoutly that he could recapture it. All around him the plots are just building up, the music coming to a crescendo. And Theo himself stands hidden behind a banner, thinking too much, as always, locked in his own endless denouement.

His eyes suddenly happen upon Millicent, looking rather pretty in a set of green robes too dark to be true Slytherin colors. Her face has gone the same color it did when she'd kissed him, in the attic at the Nott's old house behind the trunks of ridiculously lacy costume fodder. Theo cranes his neck to see what could possibly be causing tightly laced Millicent to turn that shade of pink, and he freezes.

Zach stands swaying before her, hand out, charm nearly blinding. He does not appear broken at all; on the contrary, he seems to have returned to the rose-tinted boy Theo remembers for an instant, except that it is no longer for Theo.

Millicent nods, and Zach sweeps her into his arms. Theo can practically hear the music swelling.

It should be a relief.

Theo feels as if _something _has snapped, but it isn't Zach. Perhaps he had been wrong. Perhaps a denouement was better than an ending, after all.

His knees feel rather shaky, and so he slides down the wall to sit underneath a table and puts his face in his hands, lips bloodless and fingers shaking. He got to feel the beginning and the middle; it is only right that he should also suffer an ending.


	6. Fads

Her robes are too long, but she wanted them that way.

Madam Malkin measured her before term started and in the clamor and the clangor of the snapping tape measure and the rustling fabric and the chirping conversation of her mother and the odious woman Daphne managed to get away with slouching without a reprimand. Her mother noticed later, when she made her try the robes on and ill-temperedly model them for her family, but by then it was too late—there wasn't enough time before school to get them properly altered and besides, the paycheck had come and gone two weeks before—and Daphne was sent off to Hogwarts with her robes just covering her shoes so long as she walks with a sufficiently shortened stride.

Daphne pays attention to the shoes that peek from beneath standard-issue black robes in the hallway. Among the sixth-years it's become rather a fad to wear old-fashioned knutties, the types of shoes that her father says used to be a Muggle thing in the sixties, only they put some kind of coppery coin in the opening and called them penny loafers. Knutties came out in the forties, in the Wizarding world, just after Grindelwald fell and it was okay to be frivolous again.

Except the revived version of Knutties is far from celebratory frivolity, at least among the Slytherins. Daphne half-wishes she could be a Ravenclaw and too absorbed in her textbooks to notice differences in shoes, but Slytherins (she thinks, absurdly proud of the characteristics that are the reason she's tripped over her robes twice in the past two days) are more discerning. They're a kind of subtle status signal. No one puts Knuts in the pocket; only the silvery heads of Sickles are permissible, and some have even gone to the trouble of shrinking Galleons down to size and slipping them in place of Sickles.

Daphne's mother heard of the fad this summer through her younger sister, Allison, a Gryffindor, irksomely loquacious, and an embarrassment to the family. She thought it ridiculous, and said as much over the dinner table that night in between mopping up Allison's spilt orange juice with a well-aimed _Excurara_ and shooing Tufty, their miniature Puffskein, away from the table. (Allison overheard that fifth-year Ginny exclaiming over the display case in the Wheezes shop. She immediately had to have one, and of course got what she wanted, being younger and cuter and all-around more agreeable. She idolized Ginny and tried to imitate her every move. Daphne thought it was all rather gauche and washed her hands of the affair, except on nights it was cold and she let Tufty sleep in her bed for the sole reason that Puffskein colds are veritable blizzards of mucus. She didn't like the nasty thing otherwise. It was _pink_.) And after that Daphne knew she wasn't going to get Knutties, let alone two Galleons to put on display.

She glanced down at her scuffed white trainers. Certainly, they weren't anything like the polished loafers on the feet of her classmates. Wearing your fortune wasn't as pleasant when the shoe was on the other foot. So to speak.

Hogwarts had rather a lot of people staying over the holidays this year, the first year it had been publicly acknowledged that the Dark Lord had come back. Daphne was glad of the excuse to escape her family during Christmas, and gladder still when she opened her owl post in the morning sitting on the foot of her bed to find thick-knitted socks and flowered underwear. Here in the dormitory, she could stuff the embarrassing articles into her trunk and clasp the simple gold locket around her neck to show to the other girls, and no one would be the wiser. At home, they might have made her model them.

She sat at the Slytherin table in the Great Hall, poking at her croissant and ignoring the marmalade on her left, which bore distinct signs of tampering by some of the neighboring boys. Marmalade didn't generally froth.

Across the expanse of the hall, in front of the dais, Slughorn was already into the holiday spirit (and two bottles of mead) and was giving a ruddy-faced, impromptu performance of some sort of oddly syncopated poetry. He'd charmed a strap bearing several sleigh bells to dance wildly around his head as he began to shake it ever harder, coming to the climax with an almighty jiggle of his tubby middle: "And their king it is who _tolls_, and he rolls, rolls, rolls, rolls a _paean_ from the bells, and his merry bosom swells—"

Several of the Gryffindor boys snickered, and Slughorn fixed them with a wobbly glare before continuing unabated, "—with the paean of the bells, and he _dances _and he _yells_—"

Daphne ignored him and focused on the boy sitting at the far end of the table, watching him in between bites of croissant and biting banter with Eloise and Sally-Anne. He was animatedly describing something to Gregory, who looked as if he were being addressed directly by Professor Binns: both alarmed at being assumed to be marginally intelligent and unfathomably bored. His long, thin fingers flickered in the air and he suddenly snatched his wand from his sleeve and drew a great smoking dragon in the air, which blew smoke rings for an instant before it dissolved again. It was fantastic magic, Daphne had to admit. She was good at Transfiguration and Charms but he was far and away the star in both classes, although it was well-known that Minerva McGonagall did not favor Slytherins. Still, she wasn't as biased as some, and could do nothing but give Draco the marks he deserved.

Daphne noticed Professor Snape raising an eyebrow at the display from the dais and caught the unrepentant grin Draco gave in return. She was even more in admiration of his ability to charm. It had something to do with the Malfoy finesse, a quality of movement that colored the way he walked and talked and lived.

"Oh the future! How it tells of the rapture that impels…"

He walked without any sort of affectation, though she knew others disagreed. They didn't understand that it was the very fact that he never consciously attempted to swagger or strut or any of the airs that marked one out as déclassé that made him different. She liked easy confidence with which he made his way through the throngs choking the corridors, as if supremely assured of the ability of his limbs to move in that constant, unconcerned tandem.

She found his speech even more fascinating. He had been doing magic since he'd shown at age two, so she'd heard, causing doors to spring open at his will. Latin was another chamber of his lexicon, and it spilled from his tongue with an oddly accustomed grace, liasons and dropped consonants part of the language, a mark of a native speaker. He lost all pretenses towards adolescent apathy when he whispered spells. Daphne thought his intent expressions upon working out a difficult enchantment bewitching. Appropriate.

He would live out an existence as different from hers as could be imagined. Just as they had been before Hogwarts, so they would be again, scissoring away from one another into separate futures, still but ur-gestalts, at least for Daphne, who had no cushy family background to welcome her upon graduation. Her family wasn't Dark, but it wasn't particularly Light either; neither were they the kind of purebloods the Malfoys were—her grandmother had been Muggleborn, daughter to, surprise surprise, a gardener and his rather drab wife, both of whom had been monumentally shocked to discover their son making their beloved rosebush pluck its own blooms from the leaves and had promptly disowned him before they were Obliviated, because that sort of thing was still done in those days. Daphne, quite frankly, thought it ought to be done still. Much more humane than condemning Muggles to actually _know_ they were less than Wizarding folk the rest of their lives. He married a girl from a rather ordinary wizarding family but cousin to the Boneses and they lived in companionable middle-class turmoil and had no idea why their daughter did not wish to be seen with them in public.

"…bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells," panted Slughorn, losing momentum quickly. His nose was quite red. Daphne wished he would stop.

Draco pulled Pansy to him, and looked around the Hall like a conquering Caesar. His pale eyes fluttered to Harry Potter, caught in a rare grin at the Gryffindor table.

"To the moaning and the groaning of the bells!" finished Slughorn triumphantly. The Slytherins failed to applaud, in unison.

Daphne watched her bargain shoes and Draco watched Harry Potter and she thought that maybe if she had shoes like Pansy's things would be different.

Author's Note:

Slughorn recites _The Bells_ by Edgar Allan Poe. Draco's first showing is a nod to "First Signs of Magic: Draco Malfoy" by Icarus, and his pronunciation of Latin is another nod to "Transfigurations" by Resonant.


	7. Reason

Nothing happened.

He has succeeded in reducing his sixth year at Hogwarts, in the main, into a blur of gently reflective memories, soft things, void of intimidation. Still, though, he shies away from it on principle, preferring, in his infrequent forays into the recesses of his own mind, to return to fifth year, the last year he remembers feeling entirely convinced of his own imperturbability. He tucks sixth year behind the more important thoughts coalescing in his head, thoughts about Pansy, her face nebulous behind the sharpness of lipstick and jewelry, going ever so slightly pudgy with advancing years, thoughts about Scorpius, with his cherubic smiles and deeper motivations. Like father, like son. He shook the proverb away from him. Not always.

He'd married Pansy. He has to force the sentence from himself. A mistake, but he won't tell her that. A permanent mistake. One does not divorce among the pureblood families. One does not divorce _Pansy_. She knows it too; she's never been a good liar, and lately she's turned vaguely passive-aggressive in the way she flaunts her secrets, not that he doesn't already know them—Blaise is hardly easy to conceal. He wishes she'd be less conspicuous about it; he abhors the knowing looks passed to him by his various acquaintances. Even now he can see Daphne Bones craning her neck to watch the pair of them. She looks him up and down and smiles that irksome smile of hers and he squelches the impulse to make a very nasty gesture at her over his son's head.

It was sixth year he'd been forced to step away from that persona, the charmingly devious Slytherin child. Still tripping over the hems of his robes trying to keep up with his father. It was noble then.

That was the year, as it appears in his mind, of Not Knowing What He Wanted. This, when applied in retrospect, fits neatly over the year's indiscretions like a blueprint. He is relieved at how nicely it goes together with the events overall, on the whole shifting all real blame elsewhere, or to his youth.

And in his Pensieve he _looks_ young, he looks, in fact, so desperately naïve to his own eyes that he isn't quite able to believe that by sixteen he was sleeping with three girls regularly, blackmailing members of his House into attending meetings of that—cult—and carrying around the intent to murder his headmaster in that too-jaunty stride of his. Draco, watching his younger self expostulate wildly to a rather intimidated Goyle at breakfast, saw just how unimaginable it would be for him to actually engage in homicide. He might just as easily have turned his own hair pink by sheer force of will, like a Metamorphmagus. It was one part laughable and two parts not amusing in the least.

He saw when his younger self could not how inconstant he was that year, pulling Pansy to him, pushing her away again, whirling to snap out a Weasley-centered gibe and pulling his face straight as professors sallied past. It was an odd sort of dance, he thought, as Draco the Younger peeled an answer to a test from the back of Millicent's head, pried from between all the nauseating monologues to Smith—a Hufflepuff!—snarled at Snape, unwound a coil of Pansy's hair from his finger and caught it on a ring he remembers later flinging from his broomstick, high over the grounds, watching it pelt through wafts of air and disappear into the Forbidden Forest. He remembers that horrible next morning when it was back on his finger but there was mud on his loafers (loafers! In style then) and so it could not possibly have been a dream. He remembers thinking that if he could not get rid of a sodding ring he couldn't possibly tear the Mark from his forearm.

And there he sits again, working forever on that damned cabinet, straining his eyes behind detested lenses, twisting tiny silvery tools around with magic until the planes of the cabinet fell apart again and he had to start all over. Young and grown Draco simultaneously feel the impulse to smash it, and then—

Draco suddenly feels sick. He knows this memory. He feels sick, and still, he doesn't stop watching.

Draco the Younger tears away from his bench in frustration, pressing the heels of his palms to his eyes. They come away wet, and he stares at them in surprise for a moment before jerking them angrily across his robes to dry them, and grabbing a fistful of cloth to clear his face of any trace dampness behind his glasses, forgotten on his face. Both Dracos are embarrassed. The younger's face is hectically red, twin spots of high color on his cheeks. He leans against the marble wall for a moment to compose himself, and then walks calmly from the room. The older Draco glances back, curious, and he is right: the polished door disappears the moment the younger is a few steps down the hallway.

He follows himself into the stairwell, where his younger self descends with a decent amount of dignity before his knees buckle and he sits down heavily on the last step. It's possible he might have done something embarrassing, but for—Draco bites his lip and closes his eyes, and hears the skid, the fumble and crash and sudden, surprised commingling of exclamations in the air, and then his own voice—

"What are you doing here, Potter?"

"Went for a walk," comes the reply, "—are those glasses, Malfoy?"

"I need them for reading. Not that you'd know anything about that," tries his younger self. "What was it you got in History of Magic, a D?"—but Draco can hear the humiliation and hopes that it wasn't so bare to Potter.

"I had a reason—"

"Sure, your little disfigurement. I suppose we can't let exams get in the way of vanity." God, surely he was cleverer than that at sixteen? But Potter always fell for the stupid lines. There it was, the huffing and puffing—

"I—that's—not the point!" A moment, and then, "Why are you here?"

And Draco watches himself lie, watches himself fuck Potter over with some drivel about a brothel, watches color rise in Potter's cheeks almost to match his own. He's not sure how much more he can watch.

"Will that be twenty-five or fifty?"

And those weren't even especially offensive words, he'd certainly uttered better, except that Potter just—attacked him, unreasonably, and they fought and fought and surely it was longer than that before that silence.

Neither Draco could breathe.

Draco turned his back on his memory and did not watch any more.

Nothing had happened, really, it was just—one of those little anomalies that came with being confined in a bloody mad castle. And Potter perhaps understood how responsibility could make one a bit—not oneself. Reasonable, he thought.

Draco watched him with his wife at the station. Ginny Potter retained none of the easy agility she'd had as an athlete. She looked exactly like her mother. He hadn't an inkling why Potter had married her. Potter looked just the same, if a bit less like an underfed kitten than he had when he was at school, but that could only be an improvement. Potter glanced at him and then looked away, and it was only proper—only polite—

Draco made his way across the station. There was a moment of uncomfortable expectation when he was still too far away to say anything and they just looked at him, as he pushed past Theodore Nott, standing with his hands in his pockets next to a man who'd been a Ravenclaw a year below them, pushing past the crowds and crowds, until he finally reached the Potters. Ginny suddenly gasped and rushed into the crowd, chasing the youngest of the brood. Harry half-chuckled, looked back at Draco, and swallowed it.

"Potter," he said, inclining his head.

"Malfoy," Harry replied, nodding in kind. Draco almost smiles for no particular reason.

Nothing happened, but standing in front of Potter at the station, he almost wishes something had.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: This is the end of the series. Thanks so much for reading.


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